More than 500 years ago a Chimu Indian living in Peru hammered a sheet of gold into a mask. He gave it two eyes of turquoise.
For centuries, few people have seen this object. But in eight days, visitors will see 8,000 such extraordinary artifacts -- from carved wood paddles to headdresses of macaw feathers -- when the National Museum of the American Indian opens on the Mall. Looking at objects, however, is far from the only experience the visitor will have as this museum dramatically illustrates "a native authority" in its architecture, landscaping, exhibition text and even the food in the cafe.
"Grandfather" rocks in front of the museum were blessed by the Montagnais First Nations of Quebec.
(Bill O'leary -- The Washington Post)
|
|
Perched between the Capitol and the National Air and Space Museum, NMAI is the newest in the Smithsonian Institution's system of 18 museums and the National Zoo. Its creators hope it will attract as many as 6 million visitors a year. It cost $219 million, almost half of which came from private donations.
Expect a departure from the antique museumology of fixed dates and heroes on pedestals. On a 4.5-acre plot, with almost three acres of garden, the Indian touch is everywhere. The skin of the building is Kasota dolomitic limestone from Minnesota. It purposely looks like a natural mass that has been hammered for years by wind and rain, a sign of native unity with nature. The shelves of the two gift shops are inlaid in some places with purple and white tiles crafted from quahog shells by the Wampanoag tribe of Martha's Vineyard.
No other museum in the world has, on such a scale, devoted itself to this fresh and unusual approach to the story of Native Americans. Its planners have created what they call a "museum different" that might make it very hard for museums on the drawing board ever again to tell a story about people from a detached, third-person point of view. The museum is built around native communities expressing their own authentic voices and their own interpretations of events -- part of its mission to change myths and stereotypes.
It rings with "the first-person voice," says Director W. Richard West, a Southern Cheyenne and Stanford-educated Washington corporate lawyer.
"I see the National Museum of the American Indian as a symbol or metaphor for something far more fundamental that sort of transcends the fact that you are opening a museum," West said in a meeting with Washington Post reporters and editors. "It is reflective of a turning point in American history where the United States is beginning to reckon with the history in various ways of the first citizens of the hemisphere."
That is a loaded quest for any museum. Every step of the way, the Native American community has been involved in curating the museum. This might be due to the Smithsonian's own history and bruises. The institution learned one lesson about extensive consultation on controversial topics in 1995 when it developed plans to display the Enola Gay on the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Veterans and others objected vehemently to the text proposed to accompany the display.
Yet this ambitious undertaking also might be postmodern philosophy struggling with 10,000 years of culture. The museum deliberately rejected interpreting its materials from the anthropological point of view that is the basis of most museums' treatment of Native Americans.
This is a direct slap at the National Museum of Natural History across the Mall, which has collected its extensive Indian materials through the anthropology department. Though the materials there have been striking, the presentations have sometimes treated Indians as objects of inquiry, like gems or elephants.
For years Natural History displayed artifacts in old-fashioned dioramas with mannequins of Indians in sparse hunting gear. As part of its renovation, it has been tearing up those exhibitions. This summer it dismantled the hall in which they resided. It has also returned to tribes many items that had been collected and donated by scientists. One of the most famous was the brain of Ishi, who for years was believed to be the last Yahi-Yana of Northern California. His brain was sent to the Smithsonian by an anthropologist and remained in museum storage for 83 years. It was returned to his kin from other tribes in 2000.
In trying to correct past museum practices, curators and designers of the new museum met with nearly 150 communities from Central and South America, the Caribbean, Canada and the United States. "It is a marker," West says of the scale of involvement. "We are evoking the authentic voices of native peoples themselves in having a look at their own cultures."
What they created, in function and spirit, is a museum, a memorial, a clubhouse and a cathedral. Inside the atrium -- called the Potomac for its proximity to the original riverbed settlements of the Piscataway -- eight prisms reflect the light in surprising arrangements with the grace of a stained-glass window. Its impressive overhang at the front entrance is aimed directly at the U.S. Capitol. What is that message?
West says cultural redemption and reconciliation. Indians, he says, "are a present cultural phenomena, a set of communities, a set of peoples. We want people to understand that, because for much of American history, until rather recently, native communities were relatively invisible. We are still here and making vital contributions to contemporary American culture and art."
